Evil Weevil & The Aperol Shitz

Hot on the heels of diagnosing myself as an accidental survivalist, I have been visited by a steady stream of reasons why this is a very, very bad approach to life. The first of these visitors could, arguably, have served as a solo messenger on this particular mission but, apparently, the superior powers thought I needed more convincing. And they were right. It did, indeed, take an army of weevils, several days of monitoring a flour terrarium and one (fortunately brief) episode of digestive troubles before I cleared out everything in our kitchen that is within a month of its expiry date. Or long past it.

The Weevil

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: breakfast tops the meal charts in our household. I chop fresh, tropical fruits for us all and make creamy banana porridge for Jasper while Barista Dylan crafts artisanal flat whites. Ours is such a well-choreographed kitchen routine that I can perform my role with only half my brain engaged. Or at least I could, until just a couple of weeks ago when a hundred-strong throng of evil weevils shattered this reverie and triggered something far closer to paranoia than nonchalance.

It was an ordinary morning. I had been woken by Jasper’s dawn attack of ‘maMA! maMAAA!’ stabbing through my ears and into my subconscious. I released him from his cot so that he could body-slam Dylan and follow him into the bathroom to watch him pee, while I headed into the kitchen to begin the morning dance. Ooh goody, I thought. Kellogg's Fruit’n’Fibre was back on the shelves yesterday and I was one of the lucky few to snatch up a box.

I switched on the espresso machine, put the porridge in the microwave and poured myself a bowl of my new cereal. Just a quick taste before I get on with the fruit, I thought. I popped a few flakes in my mouth and jolted. Eurgh, stale. How is this stale already? I only bought it yesterday and the expiry date isn’t until three months from now – I checked! I went back to the bowl, as though looking at it might help the flakes in my mouth to regain their crunch.

Something in the bowl moved. And then as I looked closer to find the offending fruit fly that I imagined had found a new perch on the top of a banana chip, I saw that it wasn’t a something that had moved. It was literally hundreds of somethings. My cereal bowl was ALIVE: crawling with tiny, dark grey insects who may or may not have had wings. Blegh. Blegh, blegh, blegh. I made lizard faces, poking my tongue out as though that might change the fact that I had undoubtedly just eaten one or two of these creepy-crawlies.

I tossed the cereal from the bowl to the bin and gave the weevils a piece of my mind in the form of a choking spray of HIT! non-specific insect killer. I quickly clipped the cereal bag shut so that I could return the offending cereal box to the supermarket, complete with stowaways. Unsurprisingly, I wasn’t all that hungry after that, but I still found a way to enjoy my morning coffee. Outrage and caffeine coursed through my veins as I stomped into the supermarket on my way back from dropping Jasper at school.

The staff there were horrified, which I thought was a nice touch considering this is the same supermarket whose deli counter smells like dead rat and whose staff regularly leave crates of unrefrigerated yogurt in the aisles for hours. They tipped and rolled the offending bag of bugs this way and that to get a better look at the party inside. At INR 850 rupees (~$10 USD) a box, this cereal was worth a refund. I encouraged the staff to remove the remaining boxes of Fruit’n’Fibre from the shelf but they seemed more interested in taking photos of the bugs. I took this to be a way to shift the blame from themselves and back onto the manufacturers or distributors.

Who knows if they stopped selling or if they ran a flash sale. It isn’t really any of my business. Personally, I’m more of a toast man these days, anyway.

Atta-Bug*

(*This moniker is clever and funny because ‘atta’ is the local word for the flour used in paratha and roti here and in which I found bugs. Atta-boy is a term of encouragement and admiration when someone does something well. The encouragement and admiration is for me, to stop me from breaking down and wailing ‘why is everything so hard?!’ Aren’t you glad I explained how clever and funny that was?)

Jasper has earned a new moniker of his own in recent weeks, owing to his relatively new-found interest in dinosaurs and a rekindling of his love for Indian breads: he is the Parathasaurus. On more than one occasion he has been invited to stay for lunch or dinner at his friend’s house and each time the report comes back on how many paratha went into such a seemingly small tummy.

Seeing how much he loves paratha, I asked his nanny, Seema, to start making them for his lunch a couple of times a week. I dug out an enormous, 5 kg bag of flour which had been hiding in the back of a cupboard since we were forced to unceremoniously fire our cleaner-who-was-also-a-good-cook after she was caught stealing from another household in the building. {Dinner Is Served}. I poured some of the ‘atta’ flour into a more manageable container and Seema made paratha. Jasper loved them so much that the next day, again, Seema made paratha.

Then came the weekend. Every time I opened the cupboard I saw the container of atta and made a mental note of how much like a terrarium it was starting to look. Isn’t it funny how gravity works, I pondered. Isn’t it odd that the way the flour is settling makes it look as though there might almost be something living in there. On about the third or fourth observation of this phenomenon I took the container out and shook it. I turned it this way and that, looking for weevils (now that I know what to look for). But I couldn’t see anything. I put the container back in the cupboard and left it until Monday. More hours it sat untouched and more mysterious tunnels appeared.

On Monday, I brought it out onto the counter and let it settle until Seema arrived. A brief discussion revealed that she had also gone through the same process of observing, puzzling and ignoring, as I had. We brought out the enormous sack of atta once more and checked the expiry date: July 2022. Oops. In the dark, warmth of an overfilled, under-inspected cupboard we had been carefully cultivating an invisible colony. After an uninterrupted year of existing and breeding, they probably had their own school system and space program going on in there, but alas, it is no more. Out went the sack, followed by another smaller sack with a similar expiry date which I must have bought by mistake. Out, too, went some cream cartons from the fridge, the contents of which were no longer liquid. And out went a couple of jars of disappointing pesto who were waiting patiently for the day when they became a last resort.

There don’t seem to be any lasting effects on the Parathasaurus’s digestive system, thankfully, but something I do hope will last is my slimmed-down cupboard: henceforth to be filled with nothing more active than yeast (which, as we all know, I don’t know how to use and which should therefore probably follow the atta out into the bin {Shop Til You Drop}.)

Aperol Shitz

A couple of weeks ago I made lasagne. (No surprises there.) And on the same day, in an attempt to elevate what is a weekly food occurrence in our house, I put on some Italian cafe music and mixed up some Aperol Spritzes for Dylan and me. Now, I can’t be sure if it was due to the buff meat which I bought in the rat-abbatoir section of the supermarket, or if it was the hidden chilli that made itself known in the ‘pizza sauce’ only after I had smothered every layer of the lasagne in it, or if it was indeed the Aperol which was the only real anomaly in what was otherwise a fairly normal lasagne dinner, but whatever the culprit, the result was not all that fun for Dylan or me the next day.

That Jasper wasn’t affected was a relief but also does rather point the finger at the Aperol Spritz. Or, as it will forever be known in the Rae household: Aperol Shitz.